Make ethanol from grass on marginal prairie land, mesquite pods in the Southwest, cattails in the wet Northwest, sugar cane waste in Hawaii -- whatever grows best with the least water and fewest additional nutrients (or use local sewage), and sell it locally. Make it from hemp and kenaf. Make it from corn stover.
Southerners can make ethanol with a plant that currently makes over seven million acres of land in the south totally useless, and doesn't require any fertilization or irrigation; it grows a foot a day, 60 feet per season, and can be harvested twice a year. KUDZU!
As usual the chemistry, engineering, and infrastructure is a bit more difficult than someone just shouting "Make it so!". There's already an infrastructure in place for corn. We have the equipment already in place to grow it, harvest it, ship it, ferment it, and distill it. Turning switchgrass into alcohol will be great, but first someone needs to figure out a cost-effective way to break down switchgrass's cellulose into sugars that yeast can convert to ethanol. People have been trying for years to do this with little luck.
Mesquite pods? Okay, assuming someone comes up with a good, effecient way to harvest them we'd still have to turn over a whole lot of land to mesquite trees (thereby messing up the environments of those areas), followed by figuring out how to process and ferment the pods. Keep in mind the machines that could process mesquite pods would have to be designed and built from the ground up and wouldn't likely be able to be used for any other plants. Sidenote: mesquite trees suck up all the water around them, killing all the other plants and laying waste to the soil.
Kudzu? it'd be nice if the vines could be fermented, but they have the same cellulose problem as switchgrass. Kudzu tubers are high is starch and chemically can be treated just like a potato for making ethanol. However, the amount of tubers they make is much smaller than potato plants make based on a plant-mass to plant-mass comparison. In other words, to get the starch equivelent from kudzu tubers that you do from potatoes would require many, many more acres of kudzu vines than potato vines. Sidenote: harvesting kudzu tubers is a real pain in the @%%. A whole new type of harvesting equipment would need to be invented for that.
People just don't realize what a powerful, compact, easy to handle energy source oil and natural gas are. Nothing else comes close to it. A tremendous amount of worth is being done to replace it, but we still have a long, long way to go. Like I said at the begining, just saying something should be done does not magically make it possible. Perhaps a few science classes would help you better understand how things work.
-Blast
Previous Topic
Index
